Quote

The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama THE TRUTH -- which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied -- prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.

David Mamet

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David Mamet
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: November 30
Actor
Author
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Television Producer
Theatrical Director
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
David Alen Mamet
David Alan Mamet
Writing
Denied
Subject
Drama
Subjects
Lying
Disregarded
Ends
Scorned
Truth
Prevails
Done
Overlooked

More quotes by David Mamet

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The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.
David Mamet
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I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you.
David Mamet
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There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.
David Mamet
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We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.
David Mamet
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Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.
David Mamet
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I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.
David Mamet
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Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
David Mamet
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Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.
David Mamet
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What I value most in my friends is loyalty.
David Mamet
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Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.
David Mamet
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It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.
David Mamet
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You don't know what life is. You know nothing.
David Mamet
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Film is a collaborative business: bend over.
David Mamet
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If You can't tell it to me in one sentence, they can't put it in TV Guide.
David Mamet
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Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.
David Mamet
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You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone.
David Mamet
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The honest man might observe... that no one gets something for nothing that politicians go in poor and go out rich that the Government screws up everything it touches and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.
David Mamet
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We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.
David Mamet
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A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.
David Mamet
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Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.
David Mamet